SCIENCE MAGAZINE - Some of Ian Hughes’s earliest memories are of playing in the dust and digging holes while his mom and her colleagues searched for fossils in South Australia. His mother, University of California, Riverside, paleoecologist Mary Droser, was searching for fossilized remnants of animals from the Ediacaran era, stretching from approximately 635 million years ago to 541 million years ago, during which the first complex animals evolved.
Now a budding paleontologist himself, Hughes is part of a small team that has uncovered wormlike fossils in Nilpena Ediacara National Park in South Australia that provide a key clue to explaining how a large group of animals called ecdysozoans became so diverse. The fossils represent the earliest documented appearance of a group of animals that today are the most plentiful on Earth, the researchers report this week in Current Biology.